Author Archives: Tamara Akcay

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Sculptures made out of moss and lichen. The organic foam that grows on rocks and trees and that are usually considered repellant. Lina Hsaio uses these unwanted and rejected elements to create fantasy faces. Whether painted or textured, the portraits depicted by the artist seem to always be comprised of flora.

The face shapes are perfectly balanced. The major features appear distinctly; nose, mouth and cheeks. It almost seems like the plants grew directly onto the human faces. The fuzzy components were perhaps not chosen coincidently by Lina Hsaio. Moss and lichen are different in their form of life. One is a plant, breathing and living; the other is a composite organism but not a plant. Intertwined together, they symbolize life and death.The purpose of Lina Hsaio is to question the human condition. According to her work,it’s all being summarized in the green, bushy portraits. Behind each individuals is hidden a force stronger than themselves.“Lina’s series of mixed media portraits displaying erratic forms of the human condition with elements that are not to be confined to universals symbols”

Bringing nature and humankind together is the purpose of artist Maximo Riera. The Spanish artist is making chairs from wild animals such as elephants, octopus, rhinos, hippos and whales. An homage to the extraordinary creatures we too often take for granted.

It takes the artist approximately 11 weeks to manufacture one piece. With an average of 480 hours spent on the entire process. The process is complex. First, the 3D modeling and then the production achieved with the help of about 30 engineers grouped from five different companies. The animal-shaped chairs are made out of high dense polyurethane and held by a metallic frame. One piece weighs 350lbs.

Maximo Riera is highlighting through the making of these chairs the importance of nature. It’s a subtle metaphor for anyone who wants to hear it, that animals are a innocent presence and that it is human kind’s role to find tame. Like children looking at toys, we are delighted by the idea of perhaps owning one these chairs, or at least try them out.‘this collection gives us an option of admiring what nature is capable of; this is the main reason why from the beginning I wanted to be faithful to the animal’s physique. this series is an homage to these animals and the whole animal kingdom which inhabits our planet, as an attempt to reflect and capture the beauty of nature in each living thing.’What about the real ones? The question underlined here is, how can we come closer to nature and respect and live with it? (via Design Boom)

Premier website builder Made With Color and Beautiful/Decay have teamed up again to bring you exclusive artist features. We show you exciting artists and designers who use Made With Color to create a clean and modern website. But it doesn’t just help artists create a minimal, mobile-responsive website; Made With Color also allows them to do it in only a few minutes without have to know any coding.This week we’re excited to share the work of Made With Color user Francisco Alarcon Ruiz.

In Francisco Alarcon Ruiz’s work one finds a surprising harmony between nature and technology. Ruiz brings digital techniques such as routers, 3D printers, CAD and animation software and seamlessly blends them with wood and other natural materials to create abstractions that look like a futuristic archeological dig. The surface of each piece is carved and scraped by machines exposing a hyper spectrum of color that was once hidden. Using chance and randomness to his advantage he intentionally adds a method that can potentially add errors. These elements of chance don’t hold his work back. In fact they add a playful element to the work that brings about unique elements that might not otherwise appear. The artist states

‘My work oscillates between contingency and control, visualized through material experiments resulting from new techniques that I develop to negotiate with the representation of abstraction.’

Premier website builder Made With Color and Beautiful/Decay have teamed up again to bring you exclusive artist features. We show you exciting artists and designers who use Made With Color to create a clean and modern website. But it doesn’t just help artists create a minimal, mobile-responsive website; Made With Color also allows them to do it in only a few minutes without have to know any coding. Today we’re presenting the work of Los Angeles artist Sherin Guirguis.

An explosion of colors and an intriguing set-up. The work of Sherin Guirguis blends geometric patterns, beams of vibrant shades and see-trough lattice patterns that are carved directly into the surface. Her work is inspired by her hybrid background as a non-Muslim woman born in Egypt and living in the U.S since the age of fourteen. Guirguis’ unique worldview brings together eastern and western references and harmonizes contradictory elements, both formal and social. Guirguis produces work that investigates the frictions between the contemporary and the traditional, the reductive and the ornamental. Her work engages both formal and social concerns by juxtaposing the reductive Western language of minimalist aesthetics with that of Eastern Arabic ornamentation.

Kazuhiro Tsuji creates hyperrealist large portraits of celebrities, artists and presidents. His career in Hollywood as a special effect make-up artist has taught him how to transpose fictional features on human faces. He is now entering the art world and leaving his imagination to guide his creations.

The sculptures are 8 times larger than a human head. Made out of resin and platinum silicone, they offer close to real details; such as pores, lashes, hair and wrinkles. Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, Dick Smith and Abraham Lincoln appear as if they were going to start moving. When looking at the faces, we cannot consider that the celebrity represented could have existed differently.

The sculptures have an underlying process and are not just depicting a person. Kazuhiro Tsuji manipulates the feeling of empathy. He uses the neutral expression of his characters to entice the viewer and connect with his curiosity; wanting to create a dialogue between the public and the sculpture. According to him, different sets of mood can hide behind a poised look. The sculptures have the ability to invite us to go behind the mask. A step the artist is urging us to take. (Via Illusion Scene 360)

Extremely detailed machines made out of cardboard. Australian artist Daniel Agdag creates directly with his hands and scalpel. The industrial machineries he imagines and makes are a mean to raise consciousness on how human beings are powerless and ignorant over the machines they use daily.

In the ‘Principles of Aerodynamics’ series, Daniel Agdag demonstrates his ability to produce an intricate sculpture using just his imagination and memories he collects from details on architectural elements like buildings or monuments. He doesn’t sketch anything before diving for hours into his work. His process is described as ‘Sketching with Cardboard’. He conceives a hot air balloon, reel-to-reel recorder and a radar-dish without planning. The purpose remains the same : to entice the viewer’s curiosity and to generate a reaction.

The artist’s subject matter places individuals in a position of uncertainty. The machines that we use daily are complex and we tend to forget it. Furthermore, we might forget in the process that we are being helped by those machines, and that without them we could no longer pursue our effortless life. Daniel Agdad’s examination of the effect machines have on us is reminiscent of artist Jean Tinguely’s purpose. By building creative machines from garbage and found objects he ‘aimed to satirize the fallibility and unpredictability of machines and our reliance on them’. Daniel Adgad, by manipulating a simple material like a cardboard attempts to freeze time and the world we are living in. And reconnect the viewer with what he is actually capable of achieving thanks to the use of complicated machines.

New Zealand based artist Meredith Marsone uses oil paint to blend irregular lines and portraits onto a board. The features are perfectly detailed and their skin is softened, giving her subjects a subtle glow. The palette of colors is comprised of pastel tones. Rose, ochre, washed out browns, the shades coalesce with the nudes of the bodies.

The evanescent stream of flesh disappearing into the layers of paint are reminiscing of Klimt’s art. An influential source of inspiration to Meredith Marsone’s work.
The feelings encountered when looking at the paintings come close to sadness and melancholy. In the ‘Loveloss’ series, a woman and a man are holding each other, as if they only had few seconds before they being a part. We are looking in ’Intimate Series’ at snapshots of a woman’s delicate expressions. Her eyelashes, lips and look confer a strange aura to the whole picture. She seems to be out of this time, not present. We are drawn into her soul, terribly attracted to the moment she’s in, wondering what she could be thinking about and what could possibly bring her back to us.

Meredith Marsone’s series will be displayed as part of group shows at Haven Gallery in Northport NY until December 23rd 2015. And at Smash Gallery in San Francisco until January 2nd 2015. (Via INAG)

Presenting your artwork in the best light is always a must. The good people at Made With Color couldn’t agree more and have taken it upon themselves to create one of the easiest and cleanest website building platforms in the world. Made With Colors delivers easy to use websites that are mobile friendly with drag and drop functionality. This week we’ve teamed up with them to feature one of the many artists that use their platform to present their work.

Wandering inside the landscapes of Justin Kim is like entering the consciousness of the artist. Choosing to paint different subjects according to the seasons, he ends up depicting landscapes during warm weather periods, when he can sit outside and take advantage of nature. His inspirations lead his paintbrush. By painting outdoors, Kim surprises himself and improvises on the go. Each painting is filled with soft harmonized colors that have a washed out vintage feel with wide brushstrokes and dense layering that captures the far reaching horizons. The exact locations of each painting is unknown but Kim’s rich sense of color, perspective and space makes us want to run out of our homes and search for these impressive landscapes.